Q: Let’s turn to 2004, but maybe beginning with 2000, the election in which George W. Bush was first elected. He was running that year as the kind of de facto challenger, since his opponent was the incumbent vice president, Al Gore. By the way, does that structure — campaigns and their tendency to use positive or negative strategies, whether you’re playing defense, you’re an incumbent, a representative of the administration, or whether you’re a challenger and trying to displace an incumbent, or an incumbent administration?
GEER: Well, challenges tend to be more negative. You know, that’s definitely true, because they’re trying to unseat an incumbent, and by definition, they have to raise doubts. You know, if you’re going to change something, you have to say why you need to change it first before you tout your own credentials. So that definitely happens, and you see that all the time. Incumbents [00:28:00] can go negative, depending on the quality of their challenger. And also, if they are running a campaign where they don’t have much to run on, they may have to just go after the other side. So in 1984, Ronald Reagan ran a pretty positive campaign. Why? Well, the economy allowed him to do that. The economy was doing well, so he could run “Morning in America” kind of ads. Jimmy Carter didn’t have that luxury in 1980. And so there are structural features that shape the ads, which get back to the fact that ads can’t make up stuff. It’s got to stick with what the evidence that’s available in the campaign. So, you know, if the economy is doing well, you can be sure there’s going to be some positive economy ads. If the economy’s doing badly, you’re going to talk about why the other person’s going to stink up the economy even worse.
Q: So let’s focus on 2000 for the moment. Gore versus Bush, how did they develop and implement their advertising strategies?
GEER: You know, in 2000, both campaigns were not as negative. The amount of negativity dipped a little bit in those campaigns, [00:29:00] partly because I think Gore’s predisposition was he was certainly going to do what’s necessary to win. But he wasn’t, you know, somebody who’s just going to naturally want to go after attack ads. And George Bush was a compassionate conservative. And so, I mean, these were people that pitched battle. And obviously, it was a coin flip as far as who ended up winning the election, and maybe called by the Supreme Court, however you want to say it. But it was a very close battle. But they ran a number of contrast ads, but it was an unorthodox campaign because Gore made the decision not to try to run on Clinton’s coattails on the economy. And so he ran — normally, given the state of the economy, but he felt that he was going to get tied up into Monica Lewinsky and all that scandal, so he went away from talking about the economy. And so really, the story about the 2000 campaign isn’t one of tone, of the negative or positive, but it’s more Gore’s choice to move away from the economy, which was going so well at that time, that was beginning to slip up near the end of the campaign.[00:30:00] But to focus on other kinds of issues. And that’s really where that story goes.
Q: If Bush had run a negative campaign, do you think that would have just triggered all sorts of stories about comparing him to his father in ’88? Do you think that was a reason for shying away from —
GEER: Yeah, I think that certainly was part of it. I think it was also a belief that Bush had a pretty compelling story. He had run the state of Texas with some success. You know, people underestimate President Bush in a lot of ways, in my opinion. I think academics broadly, partly because of partisanship. But, you know, this is arguably the most disciplined politician of our time. And so he could stay on message. He wasn’t giving lots of opportunities for attacks. I mean, there were a couple of mistakes he made during the course of the campaign. But not a huge number. And so I think partly, his level of discipline in not giving people the sound bite that someone can run with, like a 47% or, you know, some other statements that candidates have made. [00:31:00] But I think surely that there was some sensitivity to that. But again, that gets back to the belief that George Bush, Sr. won the ’88 campaign based on negative ads, and I don’t see the evidence for that. Because Bush had established his lead over Dukakis before he aired any of his negative ads. Just logic tells you that that can’t be the causal force.
Q: I wonder, too. In 2000, it seems like the political media was doing the attack job for Bush. You know, Gore supposedly claimed credit for inventing the internet. And then Saturday Night Live, you know, the spoofs of him in the debates, and so on.
GEER: Well, they both were spoofed on Saturday Night Live. I mean, Bush talked about “strategery,” and Gore talked about the “lockbox.” Which is one of the greatest Saturday Night Live episodes of all time. [00:32:00] I’m sure not to the vice president and now the former president, but they were pretty good.
Q: Well, 2004, now Bush is running for reelection. And so it’s a different strategic challenge for the campaign, but I think one of the things you bring out in the book is that it was a very different kind of campaign from his first election in 2000. Can you talk about that?
GEER: Well, yeah. It was fundamentally different. First of all, he’s obviously the sitting president. And we had 9/11. And from the period of 1992 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened in 1989, but the presidential campaign of ’92 through 2000, foreign policy didn’t play a big role. Now all of the sudden, it’s back, front, and center. And the response of 9/11, Bush made a very strong response, got a lot of credit, properly so. And so that issue was a huge advantage for the Republicans, because they had been able to protect us since that horrible day in September. And that changes. So you have an incumbent with a really strong issue to run on, and I think that played a big role, and was going to put the Democrats [00:33:00] in a tough position under any circumstance. The economy was doing OK, wasn’t doing great, but it was doing OK. So all of the ingredients that were there for not a landslide, but, you know, the structural forces were in place for a Bush victory.